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It glanced at the console, which displayed glowing characters and runes on a crystal display. Seeing that it was still processing, the puppet continued its story.

"When my ancestors moved into the mountain, we essentially gave up all of our previous land, the kingdom of Azrem. But King Greyber at the time told my people that Azrem wasn’t a place, but rather the dwarves who built it. So together, they created what you see today, or at least its remains. A few centuries later, I was born. My name…" The puppet paused, struggling to remember the name it hadn’t used in a long time. "My name is Torben Badgerun, son of Rainer Badgerun."

"Torben, how did you become… this?"

Sol had already guessed the puppet was one of the Azrem Dwarves, but how Torben had ended up as a puppet was still a mystery to him.

Torben raised his arms and looked at them in deep reflection. "I have a special constitution, or should I say, ability? I can see souls and manipulate them to a certain degree. I only found out later that it wasn’t normal to be able to do that since my parents tried to keep it hidden. They feared I’d be taken advantage of if others found out, but eventually, the secret slipped, and nothing of the sort happened. Instead, I was given the best resources and training to learn and master the way of the soul smith."

"Is that how those puppets and the Chosen Slayer were made?"

"Pfft! Haha! Gods, no!" The puppet shook with laughter. "Those could be made by any rune smith worth their salt. Soul smithing is the art of imbuing one’s creations with souls, be it artificial, a fragment, or even a full soul. Lets use the puppets you’ve seen as an example. If a rune smith makes puppets, they are created to follow preset instructions and commands. When dealing with unknown variables or situations, they’d likely fail. The closest you can get to sentience with rune smithing is artificial intelligence, like the one the Chosen Slayer has. It works by processing vast amounts of data to figure out how to act in most situations, but its not perfect.

Puppets made through soul smithing, on the other hand, can truly think and even feel. Given a means to do so like a voice emitter or display, they can share their opinions and strategize. In addition, things with souls are stronger than those without them. All the puppets, even the Chosen Slayer, were made by skilled rune smiths to defend our people from outsiders. As for what happened to me…" The puppet glanced at a large capsule filled with transparent but viscous blue liquid. "I fucked up. That’s the short of it. I had already become a professional soul smith, and as the only one among my people, I had everything I could want, money, women, fame, power, you name it. But I also had the responsibility to push our technology forward and innovate."

He made his way to a large storage container and opened it, revealing a giant vase with tubes connecting it on multiple sides. Time had worn it down, rusting it throughout, and it bore clear signs of damage as if attacked in a fit of rage. Sol tried to use [Analysis] on it, but nothing appeared.

"That’s why I made this. It’s a soul extractor. It uses the same principles as the life essence collector, which is how we make life clusters, but instead, it extracts souls. Its purpose was to automate the process of extracting and inserting souls into objects so others could learn to become soul smiths without needing my special ability to see and manipulate souls. The problem was… it was too strong. The artificial soul I prepared was instantly extracted, but it didn’t stop there, it began extracting the souls of everyone nearby, including myself. Even with my control over souls, I couldn’t resist its pull, and my own soul was taken out of my body. My companions who were viewing the testing at the time weren’t safe either, as we were all pulled inside.

Once our souls were inside the extractor, it began processing them to be imbued into items. This process erased the memories of the souls and made them compliant to the commands of their soon to be owners. With the machine running at maximum power... needless to say, it wasn’t painless. All the other souls were destroyed, leaving nothing behind. Only I barely survived, until my soul was inserted where the artificial one was supposed to go."

Torben reached for his chest and opened a panel, revealing a swirling spectral blue orb contained inside a crystal container.

"In here."

"I’m... sorry that happened to you."

Sol had experienced pain before and wasn’t afraid of it, but he couldn’t imagine the amount of pain Torben had endured, so powerful that it destroyed multiple other souls in the process.

Torben shook his head as he closed the panel. "It’s fine. It happened a long time ago. And honestly, I should consider myself fortunate, as I survived what happened afterward."

"To what happened to the other Azrem Dwarves?"

Torben nodded.

"My people thought we were safe from war, but how could we stay uninvolved when the war involved the fate of the world? As the home of the best craftsmen in the world, we helped the other countries by supplying them with weapons and tools for war. We gave them the means to fight back against their enemies’ superior weaponry and even the odds."

Sol could see where this was going. "So the outer gods targeted you?"

"Yes, but at the time, we believed we were untouchable. Let me ask you, do you think all gods are equal?"

Sol thought for a moment, then answered, "They’re not, right?"

"No. And even though Orna was wounded, no other god dared to antagonize him. Any god who entered his domain without permission was killed on the spot. I can remember at least twenty gods, both outer and our own, who died that way. So it wasn’t hard to believe that as long as Orna was here to protect us, we could act boldly."

"And then Orna went to sleep…"

Torben nodded. "At the time, we found it odd that he wasn’t accepting life clusters like usual. We tried to wake him, but nothing we did worked. We thought he had entered some kind of hibernation period and left it at that. But when the Outer Gods sent... that thing here, everything went to shit."

"What thing? And who sent it? Was it the God of Thunder you mentioned?"

Torben’s mechanical hand clenched, slowly creaking and bending in clear anger. "No, much worse. It was the God of Bliss."